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Back To The Future: Taking A Trip Back In Order To Move Forward In Octavia Butler’S Kindred, Zakary H. Lafaver

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Slavery is something that cannot be taken lightly. Even Butler says no matter how harsh the slavery in her novel is, it does not compare to how gruesome actual slavery was: “As a matter of fact, one of the things I realized when I was reading the slave narrative…was that I was not going to be able to come anywhere near presenting slavery as it was. I was going to have to do a some-what cleaned-up version of slavery, or no one would be willing to read it” (qtd. in Kenan 497). Octavia Butler knew that if she presented slavery …